Looking gleefully ahead to Southampton arriving at Villa Park.
Another Saturday, another three o’clock – it’s becoming a habit. Unless of course, we’ve all been blown up in a nuclear holocaust by then. If not, we’ve got Southampton at home. They’re another club who used to bring two hundred with them and obligingly get battered, then they discovered the joys of the Premier League and will have three thousand annoyances deluding themselves into thinking they’re our equals. Even more annoyingly they’ve doing well and tend to beat us far too often. And to go off the annoyance scale they’ve got one of Coldplay supporting them.
There’s not much else you can say about Southampton. Their manager has introduced some of those new-fangled foreign ideas that will never catch on, they’ve got Bryan Small’s nephew playing for them as well as Nathan Redmond, who we should have picked up when he was a youngster and who instead had to work incredibly hard to overcome the unfortunate and lowly nature of his early career. They’ve also got the aged Shane Long plus £25 million of ours that we donated for Danny Ings. I hope there’s none of this not celebrating against your old club nonsense when he finishes his hat-trick.
On the other hand, there’s no more injuries but also nobody coming back. Will we see a revamped midfield or will winning last week mean an unchanged side? Will we have finally get rid of the idea of playing Ings and Ollie Watkins together or does it get one more absolutely final definitely last chance and we mean it this time? Will the trains turn up after the match or will it be quicker to walk back into town/home/Land’s End again? Beating Brighton got us out of that nasty little run; another win will get rid of any final worries about being dragged towards the bottom three. We’ve got the players to do it and there won’t be any problems. Trust me.